9. Best Practices: Go Live
In order to go live with the CMP on your website(s) there are some steps that we recommend as best practices.
1. Setup testing environment
In order to test the CMP before the Go-Live we recommend to setup a testing environment. This should usually be a 1:1 copy of your existing website. If the test page is password-protected, please ensure to give access to the crawler.
2. Start manual crawling
In order to get a first impression on what is happening on your website, you should start a manual crawl of your live website. Therefore go to Menu > Cookie Crawler > Manual crawl and start several manual crawls. We recommend to start one crawl per page type (e.g. homepage, contact-page, article page and so on). Please note that the manual crawl always only visits the specific URL that you gave to the crawler.
3. Start with hidden consent layer
In order to have the automatic crawls running, the CMP code must be implemented into your website. While you are in testing mode, you can simply set Menu > CMPs >Legal settings > GDPR > Consent logic to "Do not allow Opt-in or Opt-out (Layer not visible)". This way you can implement the CMP into your page (and capture the live URLs for the automatic crawling), while not showing the consent layer to the visitors.
4. Testing the functionality
Before the Go-Live you should teset all functions of your website, especially the functions that are essential to your business (e.g. shopping cart, payment process, advertising, tracking, ...). You can use the CMP debugger console in order to see if all codes get activated when consent is given.
5. Go live & Verification
Once you've gone live, please ensure that also all functions on your live website are still working as expected and monitor the results closely.
6. Followup
In generall we recommend a followup-call with your account manager about 7 days after the go live. This gives opportunity to have a look at the numbers and answer questions that might have occured after the go-live.
